The Christmas Present Quandary

Alexandria Jones hated using store-bought wrapping paper at Christmas. She tried to wrap each present as a hand-crafted work of art.

Last year, she did mini-scenes with plastic figures building cotton snowmen or skating on aluminum-foil ponds — and, for her brother Leonhard’s gift, her favorite creation: toy dinosaurs having a snowball fight. But those 3-D scenes got knocked about under the Christmas tree.

This year, she decided, she would wrap the packages flat. But then, how could she make them special?

Introducing Alex’s Mother

Maria Jones stood at the kitchen table, shaping wreath cookies. She watched as her daughter tore up her fifth drawing in seven minutes. Alex grabbed a clean sheet of paper and began scribbling anew.

“Have you considered tessellations?” Maria asked.

“What?”

“Tessellations. You know, shapes that repeat themselves to fill up a plane.”

“Oh, I see,” Alex said. “Like squares on a checkerboard.”

Her mother nodded. “Squares are probably the simplest tessellating shape,” she said. “Why don’t you see how many others you can find?”

Alex sketched a checkerboard design, then started a new pattern with slanted lines.

“Diamonds will tessellate,” she said. “And what if I cut each diamond in half?”

No, she hasn’t. Her creativity has been mostly with bows and ribbons. I got the idea for this post from the 3-D scenes I used to create on presents. Do you remember the Kremlin model? I’m sure I did snowmen and a frozen lake sometime, although I don’t think I had little ice skaters for it.

Nowadays, we are always running at the last minute, so we haven’t had time to do this sort of thing. But it would be fun to try it again. I wonder if we can get ahead of the calendar this year…?

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